The Dissemination of Banal Geopolitics: Webs of Extremism and Insecurity

Although it was well underway before, in the aftermath of “9/11” a state of generalized war-making on the part of key Atlantic powers (foremost the USA and UK) prevails. War and a plethora of new strategies, military technologies and security procedures1 have become everyday and ordinary. War is more or less taken for granted as the norm, fed (especially in the United States) by a daily media coverage about “terrorism”. Building on writings by Hannah Arendt, Michael Billig and more than a decade of critical writing about geopolitics, I termed this moment one of “banal geopolitics” in two prior Antipode Interventions (Sidaway 2001, 2003). Expanding the concept, Merje Kuss (2007:284) has since noted how amongst NATO’s new members in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic, the military alliance becomes “banalized—no longer a military alliance but a kind of cultural association—and fundamentalized—no longer a matter of politics but of deep identities and essences . . . Complex political issues are rendered simple and obvious, a matter of essences”. Nonetheless, for all this daily (banal) reproduction of imperial and interventionist geopolitics (which again has deep antecedents in the Cold War), certain statements and moments have acquired a programmatic or key role. Amongst these is George W Bush’s visit to the collapsed World Trade Center (“ground zero”) in the days after September 11, 2001 (O Tuathail 2003). Another was Bush’s 29 January 2002, State of the